[Transcript starts at 1:11]
Hello, hello, hello my podcast people, and thank you for joining me for yet another episode of my favorite podcast right off the bat, happy June. If you're listening to this on the day that it drops or you're watching it, it is Monday, June 5th. I batch these, I record them early, and I realize I never celebrated June.
So nothing special about June 5th, just the fact that I messed up last week and never celebrated the fact that we are in June. And so welcome to June. Happy June.
Uh, today we're talking about Peloton, the bike behemoth, or I should say the former bike behemoth because they underwent plastic surgery and they got a whole rebrand.
And I listened to this on a podcast episode recently. Um, and I just, I thought it was a really interesting story. I think there's some business lessons that we can take away from it and I wanted to share them with you. So I actually shared this, these lessons, or part of these lessons, not all of them, uh, as an email to my email list, I dunno, maybe last week, two weeks ago.
Um, if you wanna join the list, we'll link that in the show notes. Would love to have you over there. Um, I do share different things on different platforms, and I shared there first. Um, and I decided to make it a podcast, one because once is never, or a podcast episode, one because once is never, two, because I have MOAR M-O-A-R, MOAR space on a podcast to kind of articulate things.
Um, and there's some additional points that I wanted to bring up that I couldn't really articulate as well via written word. Um, and I also wanted to get that email sent out. And so I was like, I'm not gonna sit here and try to figure out the words, but I had some time. Uh, and hence this episode was born.
So, If we zoom out, make this meta for a second, consider this with your own creation process or your own creta creativity process. Um, that you can take content and you can repurpose the actual, the exact content, or you can repurpose the ideas and you can put 'em in different formats, right? People learn differently as well. They learn in different learning styles. And some people are auditory, some people are visual learners. Um, so think about that if you are a content marketer.
So, little backstory here, um, where I even, you know, even got the idea for this episode. Um, I was making breakfast and was like, Hey, I got a little bit of time as I wait for my bacon and my greens to crisp up.
So I was like, lemme put on a podcast. I don't always listen to podcasts. Um, but I was like, lemme put on an episode. And this particular episode was from a podcast called The Best One Yet. I had subscribed to this podcast however long ago, but it was a different name. They rebranded. I didn't even re I was like, you, the cover art changed.
And I was like, what even is this? But the title of the episode spoke to me, um, cuz it talked about Peloton's rebrand. I'm really interested in branding, kind of the, the branding side of things. Um, it also was talking about the trillion dollar coin, which I was like, oh, that'll be fun to, to listen to, and pro bull riding.
And I was like, yes. Three things. I like it. Let's listen to the episode. So we'll link that episode if you want. Um, it's in the show notes. I honestly don't like the podcast. There's a reason I stopped listening to it. I find the host actually quite annoying. Um, but I'll li I will link to the episode anyway.
But the actual segments, each of the individual segments were very good. And the pe the Peloton segment inspired me to, to share my two pennies, you know, with my people both in, in email and now with this specific episode.
So, if you don't know about Peloton, Peloton was formally a, we're gonna call it, I'm gonna call it a bike company.
They had a stationary bike, it had a tv, it was a high end stationary bike company. They blew up during Covid, of course, because folks were forced to stay inside. You literally couldn't go ride your bike anywhere. It was funny because, you know, I, I was, would be walking down The Strand where I live, um, near the beach before they closed that, and you could see into people's houses, the rich people that li live on the strand, and there was freaking Pelotons facing The Strand where you would normally be riding your bike and it's just like, oh, you're so close. You almost got it. Like you're gonna put the stationary bike inside facing where you are supposed to be riding the bike.
But at that point in time, you literally could not go outside. The company, they really doubled down on this message of being a luxury brand and a higher end brand. And they sold their bikes for like literally eleventy billion apiece. And they went all in on the messaging that home workouts were elite. And if you use this ba, this bike and you subscribe to the, to the membership thing, like it was an elite thing to be a part of.
I think that any and all of us in the health and fitness space, we saw the writing on the wall. Like, there's only about so many people who were gonna pay 2000 plus dollars for a stationary bike. I bought a shit ton of gym equipment during that time, but nothing was $2,000. Nothing. Not, total, yes. I spent way more than $2,000.
But individual pieces, you know, I got, one of the first pieces I got was actually assault bike, which I think for whatever reason, I didn't do a research on this, but my brain says 695, like it was not $2,000 for this thing. I got a rower, I think that was like 800 bucks. Nothing was over a thousand dollars.
No single piece of equipment. Absolutely not. I think we all saw the writing on the wall with this. Super expensive. We've all seen what happens with these aerobic, uh, equi exercise equipment. These aerobic pieces of these pieces of aerobic equipment, right? Whatever you wanna call them. Um, remember the Nordic Track skier?
What happened to that thing? The skis were always falling off, right? They've become super expensive clothing racks, and I think we all saw that that was gonna happen, especially when people were allowed to go back outside. Additionally, me being someone who's really interested in the online space and just kind of how community is formed through it and how it can provide that sense of connection, it was pretty evident to me that Peloton's main draw was the instructors, namely Cody. I think people, everyone loves Cody. I think that's his name. And the fact that there was this community aspect of things that people were looking for during Covid. You literally couldn't leave your house. SharonSaysSo, you know, I love Sharon says, so she had a Peloton group.
It was called Governerds or something like that. Like that was the main draw during that time. To me, and I think to many of us, the writing was on the wall and it was like, how can this, how is this company gonna sustain? Like, are they really gonna keep doing well? Doesn't, I don't, I don't think so. What are they gonna need to do to kind of change things up and stay relevant?
Uh, sta sales for, for Peloton, they shot up, right, of course. But, they dropped Pretty much just as quickly. Uh, there was like that whole treadmill lawsuit as well. So yeah, Peloton does have a treadmill as well. And I believe a kid like got sucked underneath or something like that and got killed. It was a, I dunno, they kind of hid that thing, but that was definitely a lawsuit that that happened at one point and that they tried to kind of stay alive.
Um, that sounds insensitive. Talk about the kid getting under and staying alive. But either way, the company tried to stay afloat. Um, they did drastic price reductions. They were, you know, discounting everything. They went and started doing rental programs. There's currently a rental program. You can rent the bike.
Uh, and now what we're seeing is kind of, I don't wanna say it's a last ditch effort, but they've got plastic surgery, a k a, they went and did a full rebrand.
So when I first with this, when I first started this podcast episode, I said how Peloton was in my opinions to start off as a bike company. A stationary bike, a high-end stationary bike company.
Peloton actually, the name, it's typically used by riders. It means a group of rider. So I believe it comes from like the French word, like kinda like platoon, so it means group, but it's colloquially and, and just generally used to reference cycling and, and, and in reference to cyclists and the main group of cyclists.
So with the rebrand, Peloton went from a hardware company that sold bikes to a software company that sells an app. If you go to their website, it's one peloton.com. The hero video, so like the video that's like the main video when you go on, there's like a video playing in the background. It's all about the app, right?
They've changed the colors. We know kind of Peloton has that signature red. That's gone to the wayside, and actually they done brought in Maestro Green. Go check it out. The, the main button that they use is Maestro Green. The, when the video opens up, there's a woman looking at her phone and the phone case is that same Maestro Green.
They're just bringing a lot of pops of color trying to make it look really, really fun. The button, the main call to action that's on that button is actually, it says, explore the app. It doesn't talk about the machines or the equipment. Yes, they, the bike and the, um, what is it called? The treadmill. It's like in the video, but it's not the main thing in the video by any means.
And their new tagline is Work out here. There. Anywhere. Right? They are all about this app. Like yeah, they're like, yeah, we have these things, but the main thing we want you to do is buy that. They even introduced a free tier for, for the app. Um, If you go and you just were to, to Google, uh, Peloton, the meta description, so like the little description that comes up underneath the, the website, it says Access, high energy workouts, instantly. Discover Peloton. Streaming fitness classes to you live and on demand. Doesn't say shit about bike. Doesn't say shit about treadmill. I think they have a rower as well. It's all about the app and the workouts, so, we'll see if this rebrand works out for them, if it saves them. But I think that there are definitely business lessons to be learned.
The first one, that just because it's a big company doesn't mean the leadership is good. We know this, but it has to be said. It has to be said. This is what happens when you put greed and profits before common sense. It's a, to me, this is terrible foresight. They, the company had terrible foresight in not identifying the role that Covid played in their success, and then proceeding accordingly.
Like people literally had to stay inside. Of course the thing did well. What are we projecting moving forward? Cause people are gonna be able to, to go outside at some point. What- what then? We also saw the same thing with all the major tech companies, right? Facebook hiring a zillion people during this time. People were literally forced to only be on their phone.
Of course, user engagement is going to go up during this time. The co, the tech companies hired a bunch of people and then had to fire a bunch of people because everyone was able to leave their house and do other things and kind of go back to living in-person life. And we saw, you know, they saw subsequently saw, you know, user base and and engagement and user time go down.
Of course it did. Of course it did. So the big lesson to take from that is that for us as business owners, for you as a business owner, it is imperative to take into season to take seasonality into consideration, including one-off seasonal events when we are selling things, and also, or perhaps more importantly, when we are debriefing our launches and we're debriefing our sales.
A complete and thorough debrief needs to investigate the impact of these seasonal events so that future sales can accurately be predicted. The biggest thing here, if you have an event that you're not sure it's gonna be there in the future, to me, I think what we need to do then, what I, what rather what I would suggest doing is staying super lean and super nimble so that you can adjust to things until we have more of a consistent um, events.
So we have something like Covid. If you launched a business during Covid, we have to say, well, COVID likely had a huge impact on the business. Whether it did well or did poorly. For those that it did really well, we cannot be like, oh, it's gonna keep going like this. No, there's a massive event that happened.
So in my opinion, what we do there is we keep a lean team. We keep a really lean operation going so that we can change things if and when needed, which is what we saw. I saw it in the online business space where people started their business during Covid, had so much demand brought on massive teams, and they've since had to fire so many of those people.
It's not a surprise, right? We need to have these complete and thorough debriefs and really investigate the role of seasonal events, and I know outside events and perhaps one-off event so that we can ac accurately forecast kinda the trajectory of, of sales.
I think that one of the things that we need to also consider here is, um, and this ties into a quote that I just heard from another podcast that was actually really good. Um, but this idea of like, not trying to squeeze all of the juice out at once. When it comes to online business, when it comes to anything realistically, like longevity reigns supreme. And what I think happens is people really get into this, like, something's really good. I'm just gonna get the most out of it. Instead of being like, how do I prolong this thing? Like for as long as possible.
So I was listening to a podcast I think the same day, and it was the Morgan Housel Podcast. Morgan Housel is the author of that book, The Psychology of Money. Love that book, phenomenal book. Can't recommend it enough.
We'll link it in the, in the show notes. Um, but the episode was called The Power of Staying Put. We'll also link that episode. And in it he was talking about the value of basically doing the same thing over and over again and he likened it to sports, um, and how you know, when you're training, you're actually, you cannot be trying to do one rep maxes every day, right?
We're looking at longevity here. He was- the initial episode was, the episode was initially about, um, a, like a tenured professor and the value of staying in one place. Not necessarily doing the same thing the whole time, but staying that one place. So I'm gonna read a quote to you from the episode that I absolutely loved, and then we'll keep going here.
So, the quote: “Compounding is just returns to the power of time. Time is the exponent that does all the heavy lifting and the common denominator of almost all big fortunes isn't returns, it's endurance and longevity. Earning excellent returns for a few years is not nearly as powerful, uh, powerful as earning pretty good returns for a long time-
for a long time. And there are a few things in this industry that can beat earning average returns for a very long time. That's the biggest and most obvious secret in investing, that average returns earned from an for and above average time leads to extraordinary performance.”
Confirmation bias there.
People, you know, this is what I stay preaching about. Longevity reigns supreme. To me, pelotons actions really spoke to trying to squeeze all the juice out immediately, trying to get really good returns for a short amount of time. And I was like, and then what? And then what? Especially if you like have employees, you're just like, ah, we're gonna make a lot of money then bye. Like adios. Consider that, right. We want longevity.
So the second part here that I think we can learn, and this is a part that I didn't put in the email cause I couldn't articulate it as well as I want, and I didn't have that much space in the email. I don't like to, I don't like to have them drag on, but too long.
Like I'm okay with them being long, but I don't want 'em like too, too long. So the second thing that I think we can take away from, uh, Peloton's rebrand is from the consumer side. Number one, big companies don't give a fuck about you. We know this. But I'm gonna say it. The fact that Peloton did a complete 180 on their own messaging and went against what they said in the beginning, right?
Before they were like, you know, home workouts are elite, they're the best. Use our bike, fuck the gym. And now they're like, the gym is great. Anywhere is great. Our equipment is fine, but you can really just do this anywhere. Complete 180. They just want more sales. We know this. All right. I am not here to tell you to buy the bike or not.
I'm not here to tell you to use the app or not. I don't care. I am just highlighting the fact that when it comes to purchasing, use your judgment and buy things because you want them, period. This is a perfect example of what we call in marketing, contrast marketing. Contrast marketing isn't good or bad.
It's something that we do day to day, and if you ever try to make a case for something you're likely employing contrast marketing. So if I gave you like a loose definition of it, contrast marketing is presenting products strategically arranged to make the product you want to sell look more attractive, right?
You've probably done it as a kid and you're talking like, oh, I wanna stay over at Susan's house, and you're just like, well, if I come home then you're gonna have to wake up early to take me to school tomorrow. Whereas if I just stay at Susan's house, her mom would take me. It's easier for you. I know you have a business meeting.
It's contrast marketing, right? We talk about it in terms of just, when we're looking like a aesthetically right, using contrast. So within your own, like your Canva, um, creations, right? Using color to draw attention to specific elements. It's not inherently a, a bad thing. I am highlighting this so that you as the consumer just lean on your own judgment.
I just, I felt some kind of way in hearing that, you know, Peloton, I don't wanna say I felt some kind of way. I felt that it was a perfect example of how companies tend to operate and they'll switch their messaging very quickly just to make more sales. And they'll, they'll change what they're, you know, what they are, what they're highlighting.
Um, and they'll use that contrast marketing, but they're gonna position this other thing that they want you to buy as the best thing. Both things can be true. Like both cases that they're making a case for, that they were making a case for at one point in time can be true. They're just looking to do, looking to help, you know, I don't wanna say help. Looking to coerce you, compel you into taking action. There's a psych, psych psychological component of this. Yes, of course. All I wanna say about this is as consumers, let's not get mad about it. Let's just get educated and then take responsibility- take personal responsibility for our purchases, right?
Because yes, they're gonna look to try and get you to buy things. They're gonna look to try and lean on psychology, lean on emotion. We know this. So go in knowing that, and then just be like, do I want this thing or not? They're gonna make a case for it either way. But do you want it? You choose. You lean on your own decisions and then take radical responsibility and be like, yeah, I wanted that thing. I decided to get it, and we can move forward. Right?
So those are the business lessons that I took away from the bike behemoth's BBL, Brazilian butt lift, right? They got the rebrand, they got the plastic surgery. Make sure that your business debriefs are comprehensive and include seasonal events and understand that contrast marketing will always be a thing. So lean on your own wants and thoughts when you're purchasing, and then take responsibility for your decisions.
All right, this was a fun episode. I like this. Like I said, we got dropped all the things in the show notes if you wanna- I'm thinking about the email list right now and just the fact that you can, you know, present information that way, present it in another way and it's all good. So if you want some information in the written way, join the list. Um, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, additions, subtractions, you want a different kind of episode, you got a topic in mind, you wanna talk more about branding, marketing, I love this stuff. I would love to hear from you.
Shoot me a DM at @themovementmaestro,, shoot me a text, 3 1 0 7 3 7 2 3 4 5. I love hearing from you. All right. Gonna wrap it up there as always, endlessly appreciative for every single one of you. Until next time, friends, Maestro out.
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